BIO-COMMUNICATION IN DREAMS

Presented at the Fourth International Forum Of Psychoanalysis, New York, September 28, 1972.

Montague Ullman

Maimonides
Community Mental Health Center, Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York
11219 and Department of Psychiatry, State University of New York, Downstate
Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York 11203

In recent years a
number of reports have issued from our laboratory lending experimental support
to the existence of the extrasensory or paranormal transfer of information to
the sleeping subject. This information appears in the dreams of the subject and
corresponds in one or more ways (form, texture, affect, or symbolism) to a
target picture in the hands of a sender or agent viewing it in total isolation
from the subject.

A summary of the
procedure employed and the results obtained follows.

METHODOLOGY

We worked either with
single subjects over a period of seven or eight nights or with a series of
subjects, each sleeping in the laboratory for one night. Subjects were
volunteers, some of whom were selected on the basis of earlier successful
performances on screening nights. The subject's sleep was monitored
electroencephalographically and he was awakened at the estimated end of each
REM period to report his dream. An agent or sender spent the night in a
separate room attempting to telepathically influence the subject's dreams by
concentrating on the selected target picture at intervals throughout the night,
and particularly when signaled that a REM period for the subject had begun. The
target, generally an art print, was randomly selected by the agent from a pool
of targets in opaque, sealed containers after the subject was in bed. Only the
agent was aware of the target chosen for the particular night and he remained
in his room throughout the night acoustically isolated from both subject and
experimenter. The dream protocols were transcribed from the taped reports.
Copies of them, along with copies of the targets used for any given
experimental series, were given to three independent judges who assessed
correspondences on a blind basis. The results were analyzed using either the
Latin-square analysis of variance technique or the application of the binomial
expansion theorem.

RESULTS

Summaries of seven
completed experiments are given. Four of these yielded statistically
significant findings.

I. The first
screening study: For this
study, 12 volunteer Subjects (Ss) spent one night each at the laboratory. Two
staff members, one male and one female, alternated as Agents (As), attempting
to influence Ss' dreams by means of telepathy. Target materials were famous art
prints, randomly selected for each night once Ss had gone to bed. On the following
morning, Ss were asked to match their dream recall against the entire
collection of target pictures, selecting the art print which most closely
corresponded to their dreams and ranking the others in descending order of
correspondence. Four outside Judges (Js) followed a similar procedure;
statistically significant data emerged from Ss' rankings and from one of the
J's evaluations. Significant differences between As were also obtained, with
the six Ss paired with male A obtaining closer target-dream correspondences
than the six Ss workings with the female A (Ullman, Krippner, and Feldstein,
1966).

II. The first Erwin
study: Dr. Erwin, the S whose
target-dream correspondences were the most direct in Series 1, was paired with
the male A from the screening study for a seven-night series. Statistically
significant results were obtained from both S's evaluation and the means of
similar evaluations done by three Js (Ullman, Krippner, and Feldstein, 1966).

III. The second
screening study: Twelve
different Ss and two A s were utilized in another 12-night series. The results
did not attain statistical significance for either S or Js (Ullman 1969).

IV. The Posin study: Dr. R. Posin, who participated in Series III,
was paired with the A she had worked with during her night in the laboratory.
Neither S nor Js produced significant data for this eight-night series (Ullman
1969).

V. The Grayeb study: T. Grayeb, another S from Series III, was
selected for this 16-night study. Without the knowledge of S, A concentrated on
a target during eight nights of the study; for the other eight nights there was
neither an agent nor a target. The condition was determined randomly once S had
gone to bed. Neither condition produced significant results (Krippner 1969).

VI. The second Erwin
study: Dr. W. Erwin was again
paired with the A from Series II for an eight-night study. The art print was
accompanied by a box of "multisensory" materials on each night to
enhance the emotionality of the target. For example, Daumier's painting, "Advice
to a Young Artist," was accompanied by a canvas and paints to enable A to
"act out" the artist's role. No S evaluation was accomplished for
this study. Analysis of the means of the three Js' evaluations produced
significant results (Ullman and Krippner l969).

VII. The Van de
Castle study: Dr. R. Van de
Castle, an S who had produced several direct target-dream correspondences in a
telepathy study at another laboratory, was allowed to select his own A from the
laboratory staff during the eight-night series. He selected a total of three
As: one for a single night, one for two nights, and one for five nights. Both
S's evaluations and those of an outside J were statistically significant
(Ullman and Krippner 1970).

Soviet colleagues
working in parapsychology prefer the term bio-communication or bio-information
to more time-honored terms, such as telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition.
This is in line with their own emphasis on identifying the underlying energy
exchanges at work and in so doing stressing the continuity of these phenomena
with physical phenomena generally. It is also in contrast to our own
terminology which tends to emphasize the separateness and discontinuity of
parapsychological data from the mainstream of scientific knowledge and data.
The term bio-communication will be used from this point on to refer to the
telepathic transfer of information.

There are many sides
to the problem of bio-communication in dreams. This presentation deals mainly
with those aspects of the problem involving the dreamer as contrasted with
events at the source involving the agent. They may be divided into determinants
of form, content, and the general problem of identifying correspondences.
Studying these elements separately may yield clues to underlying neuropsychological
and neurophysiological mechanisms.

FORM

There is empirical
evidence suggesting that, in some instances at least, forms contained in the
target material come through more clearly and recognizably than the content
itself and that this applies to more complex targets as well as simple targets
where the form itself is the predominant feature.

There are two
experimental techniques which may have a possible bearing upon the perceptual
aspect of bio-communicative effects as this relates to similarities based on
form. Each of these techniques limits information input but in different ways.
Tachistoscopic presentations limit exposure in time. Work with the stabilized
retinal image limits information ordinary collected and maintained through the
play of eye movements about an object under fixation.

There have been a
number of experiments beginning with the awakened interest in the Pötzel
phenomenon demonstrating that cues occurring outside of conscious awareness can
produce perceptual illusions as well as influence cognitive problem-solving
activity. Ericksen (1958) suggests that what occurs following the subthreshold
presentation of a stimulus is not a registering of the stimulus at an
unconscious level, but simply a fragmentary partial perceptual response. It
takes the activated state of dreaming to bring to bear upon this unidentifiable
percept a number of response systems which then clothe it with an identity
approximating the original stimulus. What is occurring is the very reverse of
the usual dynamic explanation in terms of unconscious perception, repression,
and reappearance through the channels of censorship and dream work. The
appearance in the dream is based not on a lowered threshold for unconscious
perception but rather on a lowered threshold during the REM state for the
activation of a number of relevant response systems which have the additive
effect of establishing at least some of the features of the original stimulus.

Klein (1959) agrees
that for discrimination to occur there must be some degree of partial
registration in awareness. He does insist that subception is a real effect,
that fragments or aspects of the image register in this way and that they can
be recovered directly through intentional recall and indirectly through
associations and dreams. An interesting effect noted in subception studies is
the alteration in figure ground relations with the loss of the ability to make
that particular distinction. Tachistoscopic display of the Rubin double profile
results in two opposing shapes confronting each other. Of importance from the
standpoint of bio-communication, as we shall see, is that in the face of
experimental cutoff of information the object is fragmented, shapes are
abstracted and autistic processes shape the percept. This seems to be precisely
what occurs in a bio-communication effect.

Similar effects are
noted in connection with the work of Evans (1967a,b) in his observations on
fragmentation phenomena associated with binocular stabilization (Fig. 1).
He notes that under conditions of stabilization when a pattern disappears it
does so in parts and the parts drop out in a nonrandom fashion. He talks of
levels in the hierarchy of the visual system and suggests, as an explanation of
the fragmentation phenomena, that when the information supply is limited, as in
stabilization experiments, not all levels of the hierarchy are activated. As a
consequence only parts of the pattern are seen corresponding to the level of
the hierarchy reached. Evans also notes the characteristic stabilization fragments
after repeated tachistoscopic exposures.

The fragmentation of
images noted by Warcollier (1938) (Figs. 2-4) and Sinclair (1930) (Figs. 5-7),
in their efforts to effect transfer of information at a distance resembles in
remarkable ways the fragmentary percepts obtained through the two experimental
strategies described. Note the fragmentation of complex forms into simpler
forms (Figs. 2 and 5) and the emergence of simple forms out of more
complex imagery (Figs. 3,4,6,7). It is also of interest to note the
emergence of similar forms when similar targets are used by two different
investigators. Compare Figures 3 and 6, and 4 and 7. These findings suggest, by
implication that the neurophysiological pathways involved in the processing of
bio-communication may be the same as in normal visual perception.

In our own
experimental work correspondences in form were noted under a variety of
circumstances.

A. Explicit
correlation between target and dream when simple forms were used as targets
(Ullman 1966).

Example 1

3:40 A.M.: A circle
was drawn as the target by experimenter (Fig. 8).

3:53 A.M.: Subject
awakened and reported the following dream:

"I feel as if I
was sort of floating to sleep at the time. I had an image of a, oh, it wasn't
really like a dream, it was sort of like being on a round, like the
bottom half of a large tube, such as if you would be going into the Holland
Tunnel or something, sort of like a road. As I was traveling, there seemed to
be people there but it didn't seem to be like a typical dream, sort of falling
asleep. I caught an image and I was conscious of just having started to fall
asleep. I was on a road shaped like the curve of a trough."

"Earlier as I was
falling asleep before I turned around, I had an image of a something that's
very positively shaped, like a door stop except it was upside down and there
were several smooth round shapes, as if I was going through these passages,
these round smooth shapes, the shape as I meant it only like a rounded
doorstop, sort of like the fin of a car but it was upside down and it wasn't
connected with the car. It was just like that."

Example 2 (Same
Subject, Same Night as Before):

4:30 A.M.: Angular
shapes were drawn by experimenter (Fig. 9).

6:30 A.M.: Subject
reported the following dream:

"I had a number
of dreams in sequence. But I don't remember them well. One was, w e were
standing around, some people were standing around, and they had in their hands canes
shaped like hockey sticks, used upside down, the curved part up. But they were
shaped more like free form than plain hockey sticks. And there was in
the dream two of my wife's cousins - a married couple. We see them about twice
a year and in the dream I was kind of indifferent to them or critical of them
because of some opinions they had. And you made a comment, `Why are you so
critical?' And I had other dreams I can't recall, there were a series of them.
You sort of woke me up after I had them. I mean you asked me about the dreams
after they had gone on for some time in the past. As a matter of fact, I
remember waking up after the one with the hockey sticks and wondering why you
didn't ask me whether I had been dreaming. I went back to sleep. That's all I
can think of." Inquiry the following morning produced this additional
information:

(You mentioned hockey
sticks?) "Yes, I guess it was like a party, people were there and they had
canes, but very nicely shaped canes like hockey sticks, they weren't
hockey sticks actually but about the same size, long and the shape was very
good for them. Now I think I know ...before I went to sleep I was thinking of
the fact that Leah and I were invited to a banquet at the Waldorf given by this
international society for the welfare of cripples, maybe that's why this came,
and of course I don't like the idea of having to go formal and w e were
planning to go camping around that time but it seemed we were invited as
guests. The hockey sticks were not all exactly the same shape. It has to do
with disability, at the same time in spite of the disabilities these people get
around pretty well."

B. Explicit
correlation between dream and formal aspects of target when more complex target
material was used.

Example 3

The target picture showed a monk squatting
before what the agent initially took to be a square blue patch of stone. Later,
on closer examination, this appeared to be a garden. Along one border there was
a diamond-shaped pattern in the pavement (Fig. 10).

4:20 A.M.: " was
approaching a masonry wall with the stones put together very neatly. Someone
else and I are seated in a cab of some large vehicle-it might be a tractor.
We're coming up to this wall. I was with someone else. We were traveling in
what seemed like the front of some very big vehicle parallel to the large wall.
We came to a small diamond shaped hole in the wall. One of us remarked
'Look at that.' The wall was gray."

5:24 A.M.: "There
was a figure of a diamond, a diamond shape was in it."

5:3 5 A.M.: "We
were in Alaska, my wife and I were together. It was about 7:00 o'clock in the
morning and I said to her, `Well, it's very unlikely that you'll ever see the
sun this low in the horizon again at such an hour.' And she said, `Yes, I
noticed that.' It wasn't at all cold. We were walking along in what seemed to
be a forest with only what seemed to be very few trees until we came to one
large, very large tree, with thick branches, no leaves. It was at the time when
it didn't seem to be cold, and Lillian pointed out to me that on the trunk of
the tree there was a large diamond, like a trapezoid, that had been cut out of
the center of the trunk of the tree."

Comment: The first
dream described a masonry wall with stones put together neatly. The three
subsequent dreams all make reference to diamond shapes.

C. Implicit
correspondences between dream and formal aspects of target when more complex
target material was used.

Example 4

The target picture was
the painting "Football Players" by Henri Rousseau. (The picture
depicts men playing football, dressed in uniforms of the last century and
arranged in a somewhat semicircular fashion. The football appears as a red
object.)

First dream: "Semicircular.
In the first one, I'm sort of near a balcony, only I'm inside the building and
the balcony comes back into the building in a semicircular way. I
suppose the balcony itself outside the doorway is some kind of straight routine
type of balcony structure, but I'm inside the building (if you want to call it
that), but it's more like a courtyard, and there's like a railing coming
inside from the balcony along the floor of this stone courtyard, and I had the
feeling as though it had vines on it or something. As you approached the
balcony to look out, it seems to look over something like the mall in
Washington-toward like the Washington Monument."

"And then the
second image I got was again standing in a kind of courtyard looking toward a
sort of Roman courtyard - it's more of - it's a European kind of
building, with a sort of terrace jutting out from the bottom of the building
again, a semicircular quality like statues in a semicircle; the two ends
of the semicircle are toward me and the semicircle goes back away from me, and
there's like a fountain in the center. That's all. Those two things came to me.
Sort of half-dreaming, half-asleep way."

Second dream: "A
floor in Bloomingdales where the houseware stuff is, and there's like empty
book shelves on the left side of the room, on one of these-and these shelves
are like painted black, and the wall behind the shelf (the whole thing) is like
a black shadow box; and on it is this lone object shaped like a cylinder,
sort of like a cheese box, only small, about five or six inches in diameter,
and it's red lacquer, and it's spinning like a top - only it's not really -
it's rotating around ...and now I remember that the semicircle of the
balcony did the same thing, and also the inverted semicircle of the statues in
the other thing."

Excerpts from dreams
three through six will be included here for later comment.

Third dream: "Oh,
I think of summer camp. I remember ...that you have to be able to tip
over a canoe and right it again, something like that. These were obstacle
tests."

Fourth dream: "I
was peeling an onion and talking to somebody ... But before that, I was
dreaming about my mother as a little girl standing in the doorway of a Victorian
parlor, facing a niche of some sort, and this arch doorway was all
surrounded with some kind of filigree-like curtains, or some twig design that
they thought was very artistic around 1903 or 1904 or so." Rousseau painted
"Football Players" in 1908.

Fifth dream: No
obvious references.

Sixth dream:
"Myself and two other kids... Anyway, we were swimming in a swimming pool
...The scene shifts and it has something to do with the headmaster of a
prep school, so I suppose that the swimming pool was at the prep school."

Excerpts from
subject's associations: "There was an awful lot of movement ...I think it
was kind of a counter-clockwise motion - circular, revolving motion ....
There was even a merry-go-round in it somewhere."

Comment: The points of
formal correspondence rest on the repeated reference to semicircular quality,
the arrangement of statues in a semicircle and a form that is spinning like a
top (cf. the football). Other interesting areas of correspondence involve the
reference to a camp or prep school and the Victorian setting.

Example 5

Target: "Bauhaus
Stairway" by Oskar Schlemmer (Fig. 11).

Dream no. l:
"...there was the experience of mounds. The feeling was of being
surrounded on a field, a monstrous field, by sort of like anthills, but
large numbers of them, and climbing over them, and around them back and forth,
and not being able to find a way out. Then it changes to a feeling of wearing a
conical hat, much like a wizard ... Everything was spinning around counterclockwise,
whirling, whirling, turning, and it's going in the same direction, and in some
respects I was forcing consciously, deliberately, helping myself in the
process, as if I was doing a spin ....

Dream no. 2:
"...I remember describing to you sensations ...and these were being in
some sort of tunnel, some sort of windy, open plain, climbing up to a hill ...I
thought of... Mt. Appelier. I think this was the first thing I had
related, where I had felt I was going up a road, driving my car of some sort
and looking back and forth, but still going upward, you know, ascending this
mountain ... They weren't exactly anthills. Initially, they started off as
bumps, sort of like ...a fez, but they were small and rounded off on top
instead of squared off like a fez. It's like the little pies children make with
a pail."

Experimenter:
"Please make a guess at what you think the target for the night was."

Subject: "One of
the elements that pervaded almost everything was this conical shape-pointed,
conical, mountain-like, conical, hat-like cones ...I'd say some sort of form
element, conical in shape ...It's the one thing that seems to unify all of the
fantasy, and all of the dreams."

Example 6

Target: "The Dark
Figure" - a painting by Castellon (Fig. 12). This painting portrays four
people, one of them garbed in a somber, dark brown gown. There are four round
hoops above the figures; the hoops are held in the air by distorted children's
hands. In the background is a red brick wall.

First dream report:
"... For some reason I've been thinking of a barrel... you know, spinning
around ... There was some kind of activity or motion going on. The barrel was
spinning ...like spinning in a circle ... It was like spinning. A top.
Clockwise, left to right ...Dark brown wooden color... A red wheel
spinning around."

Second dream report:
"...I thought I saw lights and these lights were arranged in almost a circular
fashion ... You have a circle again and there was some movement there..."

Sixth dream report:
"...there was a photograph I was looking at and in this photograph there
was a bunch of people standing, and out front there were four people in
costumes whose picture we were taking ...They were just posing ...and looked
pretty ridiculous..."

Post-sleep interview:
"... All I remember at first, I think, was these wooden barrels, maybe
three or four... There was the iron rim going around the middle to hold
the slats together, and ... going around and around, spinning like a top
...I also remember something about pale greenish-white lights... They formed
kind of like an arch as though they started to spiral or circle ... swirling
like whirlpools ... This photograph was a rather big one and it had these young
guys in costumes ...Two summers ago when I went to that camp for retarded
children, they asked me to put on skits and costumes ...There is a lot of
circling and spiraling effects in my dreams, so any combination of effects like
those I would look for m the target."

CONTENT

Elsewhere (Ullman
1970) it has been suggested that the screening of content for appropriateness
for inclusion in the dreaming experience can be understood on the basis of a
vigilance hypothesis. This view suggests that dream consciousness is an
elaborate form of orienting activity designed to attend to, process and respond
to certain aspects of residual experience, with an endpoint being reached in
either the continuation of the sleeping state or its interruption and
consequent transformation to awakening.

The affective residue
which makes its presence felt in the dream operates reflexively or
automatically as a scanning mechanism. Ranging over the entire longitudinal
history of the person, it exerts a polarizing influence, drawing to itself and
mobilizing aspects of past experiences that are related to it in emotionally
meaningful ways. More recently, and in a different context, Dewan (1969) has
called this "emotional tagging" and has identified it as a device
facilitating memory storage and consolidation. Here it is viewed as an energizing
or mobilizing effect necessary to help the sleeping organism to fully assess
the meaning and implications of the novel or disturbing stimulus and through
the participation of a conscious monitoring process either to allow the sleep
cycle to remain intact or to engage in an arousal process leading to awakening.

While dreaming,
conscious experience is organized along lines of emotional contiguity rather
than temporal and spatial contiguity. The affective scanning that takes place
while dreaming can, on occasion, bridge a spatial gap and provide us with
information independent of any known communication channel. Emotional
contiguity, under conditions we know very little about, appears capable of
integrating transpersonal as well as personal content into the dream. Anecdotal
accounts have for a long time pointed in this direction and the circumstances
under which they occur strongly suggest that in matters of life and death the
vigilant scanning of one's emotional environment reaches out across spatial
boundaries in a manner that has yet to be explained.